Audio watermarking technologies for automatic cue sheet generation systems

Usually watermark is used as a way for hiding information on digital media. The watermarked information may be used to allow copyright protection or user and media identification. In this paper we propose a watermarking scheme for digital audio signals that allow automatic identification of musical pieces transmitted in TV broadcasting programs. In our application the watermark must be, obviously, imperceptible to the users, should be robust to standard TV and radio editing and have a very low complexity. This last item is essential to allow a software real-time implementation of the insertion and detection of watermarks using only a minimum amount of the computation power of a modern PC. In the proposed method the input audio sequence is subdivided in frames. For each frame a watermark spread spectrum sequence is added to the original data. A two steps filtering procedure is used to generate the watermark from a Pseudo-Noise (PN) sequence. The filters approximate respectively the threshold and the frequency masking of the Human Auditory System (HAS). In the paper we discuss first the watermark embedding system then the detection approach. The results of a large set of subjective tests are also presented to demonstrate the quality and robustness of the proposed approach.